Since the creation of the Internet, many people have been skeptical about leaving their personal information online on different sites, and no one can blame them for being careful, because in these last couple of decades there were numerous scams, credit card frauds, and all other kinds of criminal activities connected to the web and the user’s sensitive information. Surely there is less risk when someone is using a big website to buy something than with smaller companies, but there is definitely a social stigma when it comes to sharing your private info online.

That is why many software development companies recognize the need for protecting their users’ privacy. For electronic document users, one of the most secure file formats for sharing important information is probably the PDF. The Portable Document Format, developed by Adobe in the early 1990’s, is used by an enormous number of business professionals, and educators/students alike. Not only is it viewed the same on all operating platforms and all computing devices, which cannot be said for other files, (for instance MS Office documents), its non editable nature also ensures that no information inside the document will be tampered with. This is why the entire Office suite (and many more programs) have the option to save the project in PDF form, thus making it easier for the user to get their file ready for sending to another device, and ensuring the proper viewability of the document itself. The PDF’s only downside is that, since it is a read-only file, it cannot be edited without using specialised tools or software.

Among files that are often turned into PDF for better sharing, Excel is probably the most commonly used. With its advanced calculations and spreadsheets full of data, it would be too risky to send it to others in the original form because the layout could easily change on a different computer and show the wrong results. However, as we mentioned, PDFs are read-only files, so the trouble begins when you’ve received an Excel file trapped in PDF form, and you need to make some changes to it, post-haste!

This free online tool has the ability to convert your PDF Excel file in a matter of moments, and the user has an option to select the file from their hard-drive, or from one of the cloud services available (Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox), which can really be convenient and speed things up. The tool can also convert scanned Excel documents thanks to its fancy Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. And going back to the introduction, it’s also really important that there is no need to give any kind of personal information whatsoever in order to use the tool; this feature is so rare among these kinds of online tools.

The process of conversion is very simple; first you choose the file you want to convert, after that the tool will start processing it automatically (for standard file sizes the time needed for conversion is around one minute), and when it’s done just click on the “Free Download Button”. It is important to note that all files are kept on the servers for just 6 hours, after which they are deleted forever.

This is all we have for you regarding this tricky subject, so if you’re concerned about privacy, and you frequently work with PDFs and Excel files, remember what you’ve read, and give this nice tool a try.